The Mailing Address

Keeping track of your living family members should be as easy as possible when researching your genealogy. You may need to contact them for any number of research-related reasons, or maybe just to create a Christmas card list. Instead of using a separate software program, you can use Reunion to keep these addresses handy.

Don't confuse the Mailing Address feature with a Residence event field. The Mailing Address is most useful for keeping track of living relatives. A Residence event field, should you choose to use one, is great for recording the places a person or family lived during their lifetimes.

Each family card in Reunion contains an Address button, which opens a window where you can record contact information. The Mailing Address window includes three tabs, one for the family, and one for each of the spouses. This feature lets you enter a different phone number or e-mail address for each person. Also, you can record the addresses of the spouses separately if they are eventually divorced or widowed. For instance, while my father was alive, my parent's address was the same for over 30 years. This was the "Family" address. After his death, my mother moved and eventually remarried. Her current address is listed under her name tab, "Carol Ann."

The Mailing Address window includes fields for Name, Address, Phone number, FAX number, e-mail address, and even Web Page URL. You can copy an entire address to the clipboard by clicking the Copy All button, then paste it into your word processor or label printing software.

The View Addresses button allows you to create a list based on field contents--filtering the data you've entered, like all people with any address entered, or all people with a phone number entry, or just marked people with a phone number, etc.

The created list includes all the features of other Reunion's list views: dynamic fields, the mark column, and the Go button for navigation. Once in the Mailing Address List window, it's simple to create a customized Report including only the fields you wish.

A Mail Merge file is great for sending the preformatted addresses to a database, spreadsheet, or word processor. The file is created using the above Report window, then is used by other software to automatically include the mailing list data in form letters and on labels. Refer to the electronic manual for more information about Mail Merge. [Help -> Search for Help, "Mail merge"]